


The Hum of Inanities

by TheMuteOracle



Category: French Revolution RPF
Genre: Academia, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 15:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2778467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMuteOracle/pseuds/TheMuteOracle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A campus salon, with some invited guests from the world of tritonvert's Necromancy Enforcement Agency series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hum of Inanities

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Historical Reintegration](https://archiveofourown.org/works/699279) by [tritonvert](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonvert/pseuds/tritonvert). 



"An 18th Century French salon. With actual reanimated French revolutionaries. It's at the historical society."

Sue says, "Those reanimated guys creep me out."

"Camille Desmoulins. He stood up on a chair at a cafe and started the French revolution. And now he's a sort of zombie, and he's AWOL from a Necromancy Enforcement Agency group home in Boston or something. I have to debate them. I'm taking the Royalist side. And I'll have to get introduced to Robespierre and he won't have anything to say to me. I need to go to the pub before that."

"The royalist side! They'll have your head! Will _citoyenne professeur_ be there?" 

"She's organizing it."

A pause. I practically feel a telephonic chill, my phone growing colder in my hand. "So is this a date?"

"You don't have to think of it as a date. You can think of it as a favor." What decade are we in, Sue? The 1950s?

"I'll see you at the pub. High Street? 5:30?"

"Wonderful."

 

I get a cider. Fortified by cider for facing Robespierre. "First," I say, "Robespierre was deeply depressed when he died. Multiple suicide attempts. His whole world had unraveled around him. You could read the reign of terror as the reign of Robespierre's depression. Second, I think he was mildly autistic. I don't really expect him to make eye contact with me tonight."

Sue has a beer. "That will be fun. Don't greet him until I'm watching, okay?"

"Third, he's guilty as hell. I'm stunned Camille will even talk to him now. In the afterlife, or whatever."

"Our life is the same as their afterlife? That bothers me."

"Robespierre signed Camille's arrest warrant. Then Camille had a farce of a trial, which eventually pushed Robespierre's own enemies over the edge. Robespierre had no trial at all; he was just condemned to death on the floor of the assembly. You know: motion passed, execute them. Maybe they think that's all in the past now? Anyway, a man in his 30s should be aware of his limitations. Should know not to get in over his head. He could have been a great bureaucrat, the master cog around which the wheels of revolutionary administration maintained order and commerce. But instead, he went in too deep. Thousands of people died, and he's to blame."

"For killing people?"

"For not knowing his limits."

"I didn't know you did history. Where do you find time?" She downs her beer. "Check this out. There are twenty-three Cognitive Science departments in the country. Twenty-three that grant Ph.D.'s, I mean. There were something like 50, 51 Ph.D.'s last year. I met most of them at the conference in San Diego. So we've got a job opening here, right? How many applicants do you think we have so far?"

"You're so big into quantifying. I'll say 50."

"106 so far. And more coming in. There's one guy who finished five years ago and hasn't had a job yet."

"And you say you already know who's getting the job?"

"Pigslacks."

"Who? Oh. Her? And why do you call her that? And what's your nickname for me, anyway?"

"I'll tell you later. This thing tonight - this has zero connection to your dissertation, doesn't it? Could it possibly be more distant?"

"I'm sure that's why I'm enjoying it." I sit there for a minute playing with a french fry. "Maybe I'll just leave this summer. I mean really leave. Move to California. My friend says he can get me an interview at Facebook."

"Theo, if you leave here before I finish I will be really damn mad at you."

"That's a risk I might take."

"Do I have time for another beer?"

"At the rate you drink, yes. But you'd get feisty. Let's walk over and sip wine instead." Except, on the way out, we see a fellow grad student, Delancey, sitting at the bar alone. Delancey hasn't had a haircut in this decade. His thin little beard descends down his shirt like a frayed necktie. "I just got a paper published in  _ Generative Syntax, _ " he tells us.

Sue congratulates him.

He adds, "What if  _ Generative Syntax  _ is entirely a self-contained system? And serves only to promote the economic interests of the people who edit it and submit papers to it? And in fact has  _ never _ been read, nor ever will be read, by anyone who wasn't using it to further their own career?"

"Sounds plausible. I think we could nail that question down one way or another with a little bit of work." Sue the quantifier; I can see her analyzing circulation numbers already. "We're going to a salon at the historical society with reanimated French revolutionaries."

Delancey says, "Oh God, watch out for Celeste. She's on the warpath."

"Who is Celeste?"

"Undergrad. Sharp as a tack. You shall know her by her legs, which will no doubt be bare. You will say to yourself, these legs speak eloquently to the value of a privileged, equestrian childhood."

I say, "I'll be on the lookout. I have to speak at this thing. You could drop by later and rescue us." But even as I say this, I'm already thinking, Delancey is the wrong guy for that mission.

 

So we have a friendly walk over to the historical society, which is this nice old Queen Anne house on the edge of campus. When Sue says  _ citoyenne professeur,  _ she means Alice L. Shorlis, chair of the history department. The two of them don't really get along. Sue is heads-down, practical, but also kind of jaded; Dr. Shorlis is spunky, on her toes, organizing little things like this. We find her on the porch talking about the melting Greenland ice sheet with a guy who could be anybody, but who turns out to be Robespierre. He's neatly dressed, and seems a bit stiff. Alice makes introductions and Robespierre says, "Theo, pleased to meet you," in a way that's a touch formal but not unfriendly. He has an odd accent. As for the eye contact, I can't say he did and I can't say he didn't, so I guess he's shifty about it, but I must add that he gives the impression of a guy who knows how to be in society. Knows how to meet people, whether his heart is in it or not. Then Sue excuses herself toward the little table where the catering department has the wine glasses. Alice mentions "there were supposed to be  _ snacks  _ and they aren't here yet," but Sue isn't bothered a bit.

Then, to me, Alice explains that her plan for the evening is to interleave the prepared speeches with some less formal conversation. So, Camille will speak, and then she'll let people talk freely until she calls the room back to attention and I speak, and then more discussion or whatever happens, and then finally Robespierre.

When Sue doesn't return, I scan the room to see her gazing slightly downwards, towards a pair of knees, and realize this must be Celeste. I will not quibble with Delancey's description of her. Between Sue and Celeste there are two men I don't recognize. Alice tells me the one wearing a vest is Camille, and then adds, "I have sharks everywhere, Theo. The other one in the grey shirt is named Monty. He just raised eight million dollars in venture capital for his online game company. He's trying to hire Camille to write in-game revolutionary content, but Camille is too busy chatting up girls – some of whom are sharks themselves."

I don't mention just how intrigued I am to meet this guy Monty, but I make my way over to them, and as I get there, Camille Desmoulins is asking Celeste, "Do you ever make friends with older men?"

"Well, I sometimes take a fondness to men. And there are no men my own age, at least not in this school. Just boyish primates."

Sue giggles and plays along, "Perhaps he means a lot older. Like, 200 years?"

"Oh, absolutely not,  _ monsieur _ . 150 years older is my firm limit. But I'd do better to stay away from men altogether. I might join a convent. Though I hear you shut them all down?" 

"Yes, you could, but Jesus Christ would not appreciate you the way someone else would. But you know this guy Charles Darwin? This stuff is really amazing."

I guess this isn't the first time Camille has heard a line about the convents, but how did we get to Darwin? Because Celeste said primate? Camille continues, "We had Lamarck in Paris, with the  _ jardin des plantes, _ I met him once or twice, but nobody understood there was this system, this process, like Darwin says."

Monty starts to respond, but Celeste upstages him with, "Oh, look who's here: the Hum of Inanities." And over at the door it's actually Dr. Rodham, the Dean of Humanities, with Alice already greeting him. And then after a second Celeste seems to lose a tiny bit of her lustre, and excuses herself off to find the ladies' room. 

Sue's mouth is hanging open. "What did she call him? That's brilliant!"

I introduce myself to Camille and to Monty, who both have to shuffle their trinkety plastic wine goblets to shake hands with me, and soon enough Alice calls everyone to attention and addresses the room. "It's a special evening, with some amazing guests. I am hoping to capture a bit of the marvelous 18th century French tradition of the salon, where educated men and women gather and discuss ideas according to the twin aims of pleasing and educating. We'll have a few prepared speeches with some time for discussion in between, and we begin with Camille Desmoulins."

So everyone backs up a little bit toward the walls except Camille, who comes toward the center of the room and says, "Hello,  _ bon soir, merci, _ thank you cityonne Alice for inviting us,  _ merci _ all of you for coming here. I am Camille Desmoulins, over here is Maximilien Robespierre. We live in Massachusetts now with our friend Jon Metz. We are  _ citoyens Americains _ . We have not been back to Paris. Our friend Metz, he was first our caseworker with NEA, keeping us under house arrest when we were new here, but now he is our good house-mate, as you say. We take a voyage like this and it is sometimes difficult, but we go home and Metz says  _ asseyez-vois, voici le cafe, tout sera bien _ , and everything is good, right? Then he says we are not ready yet to make the trip to Paris on the airplane. 

"So I am very glad to be here. Yesterday, it was quite interesting, we went to the French department and discussed the literary style and the  _ passé simple.  _ Robespierre saw a so-called translation of his own speech into modern French and I think he was quite offended at this. Also, this modern French is a little strange for us. They have this  _ R _ sound now, in the throat, yes? So Max and I, in fact we sometimes do better at English. If you come say  _ ça va?  _ then maybe I will answer you in Picard dialect, or Robespierre will speak to you using the  _ passé simple.  _ Or we could sing the  _ Ça Ira  _ for you. And, I mean, really shocking for me is, we come to a university, but nobody speaks Latin. I mean this is completely strange. Anyway English is pretty good for us now.

"So I am sure you want to hear about the revolution. And to be quite plain I want to say, before the revolution, the king was terrible, the government was terrible, the condition of the people was ... deplorable. You have this word now in English, 'the economy,' and we did not so much talk like this, but the economy was terrible. And it was completely clear to everyone that there would be a revolution. Some kind of bloody, violent revolution. There was no doubt about this.

"What was important to us was, what kind? Because, you know, it could have been all this bloodshed, simply to trade one king for another.  _ Plus ca change,  _ right? Out with Louis, in with Philippe. But for us, we wanted this revolution to be for the benefit of the people. And in the end, there was no choice, this meant, the entire  _ ancien regime  _ had to go. The king, the nobles, the religious orders, the wealthy bishops.  _ Finis.  _ No more special classes with special privileges, just  _ liberté  _ and _ egalité  _ for all citizens. And, you know, not everything was good, the way it happened, but it happened for the people." 

I'm not sure if this is really the end of Camille's prepared remarks, or just a pause, but someone asks a rambling question about whether he sees the legacy of the French Revolution here in everyday life. And Camille answers with a sort of "yes but also no _ , _ " and then several other people speak up at once and it all degrades into separate conversations. Alice might bring this back to order, but I catch a silent moment of frustration between her and the lead caterer over the still-missing finger food, and soon enough it's like cocktail hour again. 

I look around for Sue, my not-a-date, but I don't see her. So when Alice leaves the caterer and goes back to the dean, I make my way over to them and find them discussing campus politics. He says, "The damn judicial panel is driving me crazy, Alice. Affirmative consent is going to kill us. All of our choices are bad. We could rebuild the university nanny state we've been dismantling since 1960; we could give up any pretense of policing our own campus; we could stop admitting boys..."

Alice has a hardened look and clearly disagrees. "Surely it can't be as bad as all that, John?"

He hesitates a second, then says, "Look, nobody condones rape. And affirmative consent is a fine standard for behavior. I have no qualms with it. But, legally, private consent between two parties has always been very slippery. That's why we have contracts. That's why we have witnesses."

Finally I spot Sue, in a doorway, gesturing for me to come over. These two have hardly noticed me yet, so I do.

"Listen," she says. "I went to the women's bathroom. Actually, you know, old house, so there's just one little bathroom and then there's an actual powder room, right? And I realized that girl Celeste had been there the whole time, and she's really upset. So I asked her if she was you okay, if I could help, you know. And she started talking a little bit. And, I don't really understand it, but I'm kind of worried. So, Theo, I ... I'm just saying, if she makes a big scene and then stomps off, or whatever, I might want to follow her and try to catch her and make sure she doesn't throw herself under a bus or anything. Is that okay with you?"

"Oh my God," I say, "of course."

"So, if that happens, I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"

"Sure."

And then suddenly it's kind of awkward, and I shuffle around and Dr. Shorlis catches my eye. I nod to her that I'm ready whenever. So she speaks up. You might think she's just this pale little British lady, but she can command the room in an instant when she needs to. She says, "Thank you so much, Camille, for launching us into those discussions. I am also pleased to have Mr. Theo Alecteu here. Theo is a doctoral student in human geography, and I asked him to give us a wholly different and modern point of view."

I pull out my notes. I'll try not to refer to them too much.

"Thank you Alice.  _ Messieurs-dames _ , good evening. Tonight I will ask you to consider the world we live in. To begin, let us look at pairs of countries and ask how one differs from the other. How is Spain different than France? How is Finland not like Sweden? You might immediately think of language: they don't speak much French in Spain. And culture: each has distinctive food and distinctive music. Compared to Swedes, Finns drink more vodka and have more contact with Russia. 

"What if we compare the governments of these countries? In theory, Spain is less centralized than France, and yet it somehow has faster trains. Of course, Spain and France are E.U. member nations, with European currency and open borders, and this fact constrains the differences between them.

"If we talk for long enough, someone will point out that one country has a king, and the other does not. This is true for both pairs. Yet today this difference does not seem to be the sort of thing that  _ makes _ any difference. I doubt we will look at any difference between Finland and Sweden, especially a political one, and find that it naturally follows from Sweden having a king. Particularly in the sphere of individual rights, parliamentary democracy, and the other great enlightenment ideas that we associate with the French Revolution: Sweden is not less democratic than Finland, and does not trail it in liberty or equality. The French on the whole are not unquestionably more free, or more equal to one another, than the Spanish.

"Rather, it is a simple historical artifact whether a country has a hereditary head of state. France has no monarchy in part because Louis XVI failed to save the monarchy from the revolution. For several years, he might have adapted the monarchy to coexist with the new revolution, but he did not. Camille has just said, in the end, there was no choice; but in the beginning, there was choice. In Sweden, things were different. The monarchs navigated the  _ fin-de-siecle  _ and the nineteenth century more adeptly, losing their political power, but not their heads. The Spanish kings fled into exile in 1873 and again in 1931, but returned. 

"My first point: the presence of a king in today's Europe is not in itself injurious to democracy. Now I will ask if it, in fact, poses any  _ advantages  _ to democracy. And for this question, we return to Spain. As I said, today Spain is a liberal modern state, and a member of the European Union, and is no less republican than France, but forty years ago, Spain was ruled by a military dictator. Over those forty years it has steadily and peacefully transformed into the country we know today, and many people made this possible, but one who certainly deserves credit is the king, Juan Carlos. The king spent the first half of his life courting favor with General Franco, so that Franco died with Juan Carlos as his appointed political heir, and then has spent the second half destroying the dictatorial, one-party legacy that Franco had built, and replacing it with a real democracy. After four years of this republic, the military occupied parliament and attempted another coup, but Juan Carlos stood up as commander in chief and said the crown, which is the symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot tolerate this attempt to interrupt the democratic process.

"When the institution of the monarchy had great power, it was a force of oppression. Now it has been stripped of that power, but a king is still an influential person, who is given a good education, and is taught to identify with the people of his nation. Of course Professor Shorlis here is British, so she might be astonished that royals could ever be good for anything. And, you know, Camille, this is Juan Carlos de Borbon we discuss. He descends from Louis Quatorze. You may have feared the whole family would be as inept as Louis Capet. A king might be a man of no consequence, interested only in fast cars, or he might, like Juan Carlos, be a force of liberation."

And Camille says, "I suppose, it is possible, we have died and then returned to a sort of reverse world where one speaks English at the University and the Bourbon  _ aristos _ sit on the left." 

Then as the laughter dies down, the caterer chimes in, "Professor Shorlis, the hors-d'oeuvres have arrived." And the polite intellectual mob descends on the olives and little sandwiches as if Camille had stood upon a chair and egged them on.

So eventually I've got a few crackers and some cheese and I'm trying to talk to Monty again when someone – a man – makes a noise that cuts through the crowd. I think most people hear  _ something,  _ but I, at least, don't know what he said. It gets my attention though, and I look around just in time to catch Dr. John Rodham, Dean of Humanities, with Celeste glaring at him from hardly an inch away.

And then, loud and clear, she tells him, "Fuck this, John. Fuck this." And gives her trinkety plastic wine goblet a side-arm fling onto the bus tray, on her way out the door and down the steps. Quickly followed by my not-a-date.

I'm sure other people are going to tell you that she threw a wine glass, but that's not really what it was at all. First, it wasn't glass, and second, she gave the little thing a perfectly athletic lateral toss and landed it right on the tray. Only, it was still half full, so it spilled some white wine, and, skidding to a stop there on the tray, it knocked against another flimsy little goblet which fell off onto the floor.

People might also tell you she was just aiming for attention, but if you saw Rodham, if you saw how tense they both were, and how they were standing close enough to whisper, even though they ended up screaming, you won't believe he was blind-sided.

The room has been stunned to silence, anyway. Rodham glances at Alice, but she won't look at him, and he slinks toward the back. Alice steps up and says, adeptly, "Well, friends, the salon was an important venue for science and philosophy in the 18th century, and also for political discourse. But we'd be wrong to think it was only  _ ever  _ that. Of course a salon can be an emotional affair as well. We would hardly do it justice if nobody got upset. But with that out of the way, I'd like to present Maximilien Robespierre." 

So we're already feeling a chill, as Robespierre begins speaking. He seems paler and stiffer than he did on the porch.

"Citizens, I am called Robespierre, and I stand before you as a soul that believes itself to remember a childhood; believes itself to have attended the  _ lycee Louis le Grand  _ with M. Desmoulins; generally assumes itself to inhabit a body it has inhabited since birth. And yet, as you can see, the body before you possesses a head. This soul remembers with some clarity the last days before its previous head and previous body were separated. After this separation, as if no time had passed, I, the soul, found myself again embodied, in a room with electric lights, in the company of persons called Desmoulins, Danton, Saint-Just, Marat.

"Marat, not assassinated, but with me. Danton, Camille, not executed by the revolution, but with me, heads and bodies together. And I wept. I faced a crisis of existence that I wish for none of you ever to face. And then, step by step, I began learning to live in your strange, crowded world.

"Do you even know how crowded it is? In the eighteenth century, we had Paris, a big city. Marseille and London were big cities, and there were smaller cities like Calais, but between all of these was countryside. Farms, villages, places with more animals than people. But in your century, maybe you say this city is Boston and that one is Cambridge and that one down there is Baltimore or Philadelphia or some such. But what you actually have is house then house then house then house house house then house house house house, then more houses,  _ maison puis maison puis maison puis maison,  _ in all directions. And maybe you don't know this, because you were born in this and never saw flocks of birds, but you have no real flocks of birds. Maybe you don't know this, because you were born in it and have never seen the stars in the sky, but you have not many stars.

"You do know – because you talk about it – that you are making the world hotter. You know this the way Louis XVI knew that France had a problem with money. You know this the way Louis XVI knew that his government disrespected the timeless rights of all men and citizens. And like Louis, if you continue your disrespect, you must die. And the more the disrespect continues, the more violent and numerous the death will be."

He pauses for a moment. We started out scandalized, and now we've been damned to hell. I look around again for Rodham; he's not here, but I do notice Delancey, straggly beard and all. I'm not sure when he came in.

Robespierre talks more. He says – directed to me, I suppose – the crown is not a symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, but only a symbol of tyranny. But then I slip out the same door Rodham did, toward the back of the house, and find a sofa in a sitting room. I suddenly feel the weight of it all: the cider, the pub food, public speaking, Sue ditching me, my housemates, my dissertation. I can hear Alice saying something about one man even in the eighteenth century who knew about global warming. He asked why the classical sources say the Danube always freezes solid in January, when the Austrians today know that it almost never freezes? And he answered, this is because of the warming effect of civilization. It was a discussion that could have taken place in a salon like this one. I close my eyes and sink into sleep.

 

I wake up with Alice touching my shoulder, asking if I'm okay; Camille standing beside her. Otherwise the house is quiet and empty.

"I'm walking Camille back towards his hotel. Would you like to come with us?"

"Oh, yes. Thanks."

On the porch, Robespierre and Delancey are sitting on a bench together, animated and engrossed in conversation; Robespierre, no longer stiff, but smiling and looking quite alive.

Camille says, "Maximilien, you will find your way back, yes?" And then, to us, "There is no use to wait for him – he will be here half the night."

So we set out across campus towards the little hotel on the other side, and Alice says, "Those two seem like peas in a pod. I think I heard three different languages going on."

Camille adds, "Yes, I heard some Greek."

"What's funny about that," I mention, "for them to be so alike, is their opposite circumstances. One of them had a whole nation hanging on every word, and the other thinks he's traveled too many miles down an inconsequential rat hole."

Then, after we pass the campus bell tower, I mention that I'm puzzled how Celeste and Dr. Rodham might know each other.

"Oh," says Alice, "I know exactly how they met. It was back in September. There was a case before the judicial board, and Celeste was a very useful witness. None of the other students involved were being at all reliable. But then that ended, and there was no reason for him to ever contact her again afterwards. No reason at all. I'm sure he wanted to tell me he had no idea what any of that ... outburst ... was about tonight. I didn't let him. I wasn't going to give him a chance to lie."

Then we reach the other edge of campus. The little hotel and, I suppose, Alice's parking space are to the left. My house is to the right. So I say good night to them both, the historian and her subject.

This is a late-night walk I make three or four times a week. I have a routine. For each block between campus and home, I consider one item on my to-do list. Monroe Street: finish grading last week's quizzes. Tomorrow over coffee. Madison Street: pull together next week's lecture. Jefferson: chapter four of the dissertation. Just plan to spend three days in the library and surely you can tie it up somehow. Adams: chapter six. My advisor doesn't like it, but write one more draft, sell Alice on it, and get her to sell it to him. Washington: chapter five is just a pile of notes. Just a pile. It needs three weeks, a big table, a few cans of Illy Espresso, and a crystalline clarity of mind. And then I'll be done. I'll be home.

 

 


End file.
